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Dessert

Burnt Sugar

Burnt sugar is a caramelized sugar used to color broths, sauces, and gravies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Pierre Blot · From a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and coffee are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,344 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Burnt Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. Place an old tin ladle over a sharp fire, add two ounces of loaf sugar, and stir with a stick or skewer until it is thoroughly black and burnt.

  2. Add, little by little, about one gill of water; stir a little, boil about four minutes, but not fast, lest it should boil over the ladle.

  3. Strain, and it is made.

Store

  1. As soon as cold, bottle it and use when wanted.

  2. It keeps any length of time.

By Pierre Blot. Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures. See the original page.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Burns to a dark brown colour and bittersweet flavour when heated dry.
Water
Dissolves the burnt sugar into a pourable, flavourful liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the water. Water poured onto very hot burnt sugar flashes into steam and spits violently. Adding it little by little and boiling gently keeps the mixture under control and stops it boiling over.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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